A Woman Is Getting Hate Mail After Trying To Bake Bread With Vaginal Yeast

Blogger Zoe Stavri is working on a new sourdough bread recipe--one that involves vaginal yeast.

In a blog post about the project, Stavri writes that she came up with the idea when she realized she had a yeast infection, and wondered if she could actually make bread using yeast produced by her own body.

1 small Greek coffee-sized cup of plain flour1/2 small Greek coffee-sized cup of waterAs much vaginal yeast as I could scrape off a dildo I put in my vagina–my estimate is that there was about as much of it as would lightly coat a single tine of a fork, and no more.

Method:

Mix the ingredients together.

Cover in foil, leave

The next day, “feed” it 1 small Greek coffee-sized cup of flour, 1/2 small Greek coffee-sized cup of water.

Cover it back up

Repeat the feeding

idk what I’ll do next, I’m only on the third day.

Stavri hasn't reached the point yet where she can use the mixture to make bread, but reports that she's received hundreds of sexist, violent and threatening comments related to the project.

"I was quite surprised by the strength of the negative reaction from certain quarters of the internet," Stavri tells SELF. "As a woman on the internet I've definitely received more than my share of trolling in the past, but this is a whole new level and it seems to me like an overreaction to something I'm cooking that they don't have to eat."

Mary Jane Minkin, M.D., clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Yale Medical School, tells SELF that the project may not work because the yeast used in cooking is very different from the yeast produced by a woman's vagina.

"The stuff in the vagina is typicallyCandida albicans," she says. "The organism people talk about as yeast [in cooking] is Saccharomyces—a totally different genus."

Minkin also pointed out that most of the “ingredients” Stavri harvested from her body aren't yeast.

“Very little is actual yeast,” Minkin says. It’s more likely mostly cervical and vaginal mucus—when you have a yeast infection, the vagina essentially goes into hyperdrive trying to clean the infection out, creating a ton of discharge. “Of the total sample only a small amount of it is going to be a yeast culture […] but most of the white cottage cheesey stuff isn’t going to be yeast."

Finally, Minkin does not think the project is in any way dangerous.

"Many people who have oral sex done to them have yeast infections," Minkin says. "I don’t think that anyone has died from eating a little yeast there."

Stavri believes that the negative reactions to her project have very little to do with safety concerns.

"I suspect the vast majority of the utter horror about my sourdough isn’t anything to do with ignorance on food hygiene, but more to do with a general mistrust and horror at vag," she writes in a blog post. "I say this because I suspect if I were making my own any-other-thing-except-sourdough-using-vaginal-yeast, people probably would have just left me to it."

Stavri is adamant that trolls won't influence her.

"What's keeping me going is a small but significant vein of supportive comments and people who are genuinely interested in what I'm doing," she tells SELF. "Their comments mean far more to me than another troll who thinks he's clever."